Actor fully committed to San Diego

Turn as an Italian gondolier in China puts the local theater scene in perspective

David McBean could practically fill the seats of Cygnet Theatre’s Rolando performance space with all the characters he plays in “Fully Committed,” the solo show about a New York restaurant employee with Olympian phone skills.
— Earnie Grafton / Union-Tribune

David McBean could practically fill the seats of Cygnet Theatre’s Rolando performance space with all the characters he plays in “Fully Committed,” the solo show about a New York restaurant employee with Olympian phone skills.
/ Earnie Grafton / Union-Tribune

RECENT CREDITS:
Title role in “Bunbury,” Diversionary Theatre, 2007; multiple roles in “It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play” (Cygnet, 2008), and “Shipwrecked!” (North Coast Rep) and “Twist” (Diversionary), both 2009.

COMING UP:
“It's a Wonderful Life” at Cygnet's Old Town Theatre, December; “Glorious! The True Story of Florence Jenkins: The Worst Singer in the World,” North Coast Rep, January 2010.

KEY COMMENT:
“It's been an eye-opening experience to do something I didn't care about for a year, for money. Here, I get to choose the things I want to do. And there's a lot of amazing art that happens in this town.” (On the perspective gained from a job as a gondolier.)

You can call David McBean a master of multicharacter acting, a quick-change virtuoso, a performer who summons more identities than an Internet spam artist.

Just don't, for the love of Pisa, call him Vincenzo.

For a year he'd really rather forget, McBean labored as a Venetian gondolier, crooning romantic tunes in Italian and regaling his passengers with tales of his native land.

Which is weird, because a) The actor was born and raised in San Diego, and b) He was in China at the time.

“Pretending to be Italian — that was the worst part for me,” McBean says with a pained smile, recounting his 2007-2008 stint as a gondolier for tourists at the massive Venetian Macao luxury resort near Hong Kong.

“You were supposed to have this character name (“Vincenzo” derives from McBean's middle name, Vincent), plus a back story, where you were from. It was supposed to be an authentic gondola experience.”

Granted, McBean is an actor, and this was a sort of performance.

“But it didn't feel that way to me, because all the acting I've done has been with a script, with a director,” he says.
“That
feels like acting to me. This just felt like lying.”

Still, McBean fibbed all the way to the bank, not only earning his nautical stripes (and gondoliers do love some stripes) but getting paid “a ton of money,” which was pretty much the point.

Now, he's back in town, with a modest financial cushion (a luxury for most theater people) that's letting him do the work he loves again.

As painful as the faux-Italian sojourn might've been for McBean, it was also a trial for theatergoers who'd gotten used to seeing this versatile performer on stages around the county. (As was an earlier yearlong absence, when McBean made an abortive move to Seattle to train as an interpreter for the deaf.)

What they've been missing is fully evident in “Fully Committed,” the solo show that just went up on Cygnet Theatre's Rolando stage, near SDSU. In the piece — McBean's fourth go-round with the Becky Mode play for Cygnet — he plays Sam, an aspiring stage actor whose day job entails manning the reservations line of a snobby New York restaurant.

McBean also plays everyone who's not Sam, which adds up to 40-some characters — co-workers, customers, relatives, friends and enemies. For 70 minutes, he pings deftly from one character to another, and through some theatrical alchemy, one man onstage becomes dozens chattering at each other in a playgoer's brain.

“It's so funny how that happens,” McBean says of the audience buy-in. “I love that about theater. At first, you're just: ‘What ... on ... Earth?’ And then you're just: ‘OK!’”

It's mostly a comic show, and comedy (as well as musical theater) is mostly what McBean has become known for, though he's just as keen to do drama.

One of four children born to an artistically inclined local family, McBean — whose distinctive surname is a combination of his father's, Bean, and his mother's, McGee — graduated from the School of Creative and Performing Arts in 1995. He then attended the University of San Diego, where his father is a professor of math and computer science.

Mentored by such local notables as the late Priscilla Allen and, later, Annie Hinton, McBean did his first professional show while still in high school — San Diego Rep's after-hours staging of “Renegade Sluts on Bikes.”

He's been a familiar presence on local stages since then, his choir-boy face — McBean in fact serves as music director for Mission Hills United Methodist Church — making an intriguing contrast with his bass-baritone vocals. (“I've been told my voice doesn't really make sense for how I look,” he says.)

Curiously enough, for someone willing to carry an entire show on his back, McBean says he doesn't much like to call attention to himself.

“One of the weirdest parts of being an actor is self-promotion,” he says. “I don't even like bowing. That's one of the worst parts of the show for me. I'd rather leave.

“But I realize as an audience member, you want that opportunity. It finishes the experience. I get that now. Actually, my director had to explain that to me. Like, ‘David, you can't just leave. They'd feel cheated.’”

They might be feeling a little less cheated now that McBean has decided to hang around for a while — thanks, in part, to lessons learned from “Vincenzo.”

“It just shifted my relationship with what matters,” McBean says of his overseas adventure. “I really love it here. I like being around my family. I think I have it pretty good here. There aren't a lot of reasons I can think of to leave.”